At the Site of State Violence: Doris Salcedo’s and Julieta Hanono’s Memorial Aesthetics

While all public art has the capacity to commemorate historical events, much post-dictatorial memorial art in Latin America challenges the traditional temporal and physical frameworks characteristic of public monuments. Artists such as the Colombian Juan Manuel Echavarría, Uruguayan Luis Camnitzer, Argentine Nicolás Guagnini, or the Mexican Teresa Margolles, confront the challenge of representing and alluding to violence without stylizing it.¹ In this essay I focus specifically on projects by the Colombian Doris Salcedo and Argentine Julieta Hanono, two contemporary artists whose work maps the bodies of victims lost to state-dictated violence onto the actual spaces that contained the historical traumas. Examining Salcedo’s Noviembre 6 y 7, a memorial to the 1985 victims of the siege on the Palace of Justice and the ensuing massacre in Bogotá, and Hanono’s El pozo, a video installation depicting the space where the artist was imprisoned for two years as a victim of the Argentine military secret police during the Videla dictatorship, I reflect on how these artists memorialize violence through a phenomenological relationship to site that at once centralizes the absent body and invites viewers to participate in a collective historical reflection.

Although Salcedo and Hanono utilize different materials and approaches to framing historical memory, they both rely primarily on physical space to evoke haunting memories of state violence. In these pieces, the conspicuous absence of any physical bodies invites the viewer to imagine space as a medium for political critique. Furthermore, both artists position the spectator as a witness, forcing him or her to confront a visual rendering of national loss. Installed at the site of tragedy, the artworks aim to trigger the audience’s civic memories and to connect specific locations with national histories, without resorting to official discourses of mourning. By inviting spectators to join in a collective exercise of witnessing, these artworks redefine what constitutes the intervention of art in the public sphere.

Doris Salcedo, Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002): The Façade of Violence

Doris Salcedo’s Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002) recalls a violent and still contested event in Colombian history. In 1985, thirty-five members of the leftist guerilla group M-19 held several hundred people hostage, including twenty-four justices and twenty judges, inside the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombia. In exchange for releasing the hostages, they demanded that President Belisario Betancur be put on trial. During the takeover, the guerillas set court records on fire, eventually reducing the Palace of Justice to ruins. The military responded with an assault that lasted twenty-seven hours, a confrontation that resulted in the deaths of the hostages, soldiers, and all of the guerrillas, including their leader Andrés Almarales and four other senior M-19 commanders. Most historical accounts conclude that more than one hundred people died during the final assault on the Palace, although by some accounts those numbers are as high as 284 (the number Salcedo relies on for her installation). In November 2005 the Columbian Truth Commission on the Palace of Justice convened, concluding in 2009 that the national government never had a plan that prioritized saving the lives of the hostages (Comisión de la Verdad). In 2010 Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega, the military officer in charge of the rescue operation, became the first high-ranking military official to be charged and sentenced for his role in the attack. The history of the event remains highly contested to this day, and Salcedo offered her interpretation of the events and its effects in 2002, several years before the Commission was convened.²

Commemorating the violent seizure of the Palace of Justice siege and the massacre that ensued, Salcedo’s Noviembre 6 y 7 occurred at the reconstructed Palace of Justice on the seventeenth anniversary of the attack. Through her work, Salcedo sought to measure the scale and duration of the siege. From 11:35 am onward—the time when the first person was killed—two hundred and eighty wooden chairs were slowly suspended against the façade of the building from different points on its...